Prominent environmental attorney and advocate Mary Ellen Ternes, BE’84, will deliver the inaugural Mary Ellen Ternes Distinguished Lecture, hosted by the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate (VSEC), on October 22.
The lectureship was endowed last spring in honor of Ternes, who will be speaking on “The Value of Interdisciplinary Expertise in Designing for Sustainability, with Plastic Focus.” The event is open to the Vanderbilt community and is scheduled for 3 p.m. in Room 134 of Featheringill Hall. A reception will follow.
The aim of the lectureship is to support lectures on interdisciplinary solutions for global challenges in sustainability, energy, and climate, reflecting Ternes’ legacy in environmental law and engineering. She has more than 30 years of experience at the intersection of energy, manufacturing, air quality, hazardous waste management, infrastructure and disaster response.
After earning a degree in chemical engineering at Vanderbilt, she pursued a career in emergency response and hazardous waste site removal actions, chemical waste treatment and destruction, and air pollution control and permitting in both federal government and industry.
In 2020, Ternes, an American Institute of Chemical Engineers Fellow, was elected president of the American College of Environmental Lawyers, an organization dedicated to the development of environmental law at state and federal levels. She was appointed to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Roundtable on Plastics in March 2024 and participated in the recent UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution in held Ottawa, Canada.
About VSEC
The Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate launched in April, 2024 as part of the Discovery Vanderbilt initiative. VSEC’s primary mission focuses on advancing multidisciplinary research that includes partnerships with communities, government, industry, national laboratories and other research universities. The center also engages Vanderbilt’s world-class engineering, science, law, policy and education expertise to investigate areas such as energy integration; resource sustainability; climate change mitigation and adaptation; and systems risk, reliability, and resilience.